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Sunday, August 12, 2012

More on the House

We've been excitedly, casually house-hunting since April. The plan was to buy a house when we were finished with Cares, in February 2013. Things have changed with Cares. Long story-short, it just wasn't a good fit for us anymore or for our apartment community. After discussions with our Regional Director, we felt that it would be better for the Cares Program if we stepped aside and let a new Cares Team come in and start fresh. We think Cares is great, but with Matt student teaching and with the adoption process, we knew it was only going to be tougher to do a great job as a Cares Team. So, now we will be done with Cares in September.

So, for the last 2 weeks, the house-hunting process was accelerated. We looked a lot on our own for the first week. Drove to all areas of town, explored lots (thinking we would build a modular home), a family home that had recently been re-done, and houses we found on the internet. We were fairly discouraged with the options that were in our price-range. So we knew we needed help.

We signed with a realtor last Friday, August 3rd. We knew we wanted to work with Brent anyway but didn't know how great he would be! After our initial meeting and signing a buyer's agreement with him, we got lots of emails with potential houses. We checked out several over the weekend but only wanted to see the inside of one house.

Love the wood floors, gas fireplace, high ceilings and openness.

This house, we call it "Ponderosa", like the ranch, had JUST been reduced from 145,000 to within our price range. It's a Foreclosure, so we were nervous, but it's beautiful! We saw it on Monday morning and loved it! It's not perfect, but it's a perfect first house. Especially compared to the other houses in our budget, we knew we wanted to make an offer!

Losing closet space but excited about hardwoods, double sink and being on the first floor!

So, we made an offer on Tuesday (after reading through 20+ pages with our realtor), received a counter on Wednesday, made a new offer (don't really know the terms) on Thursday and received a counter that afternoon. We came to an agreement on Friday morning and setup House and Termite Inspections for this coming week. If all goes well with inspections, we should be closing in the middle of September. We are excited!

Check out the patio and playset!

The dogs are gonna love having a back yard, and we're gonna love not having to take them up & down 3 flights of stairs! We can totally imagine bringing our children home from the hospital to this house. We look forward to having get-togethers with our new neighbors and celebrating birthdays with our family and friends. Hopefully at this house. I'm including lots of pictures. These are all from the listing site. I hope to have more pictures after our inspection on Monday.

Nursery not pictured. Kinda bummed about no pantry but (hopefully) plenty of cabinets.

4 comments:

Congratulations, TriciaFrom some old friends, Tony and Kathy BowmanA good friend who just moved away told me she met you and somehow our names came up. Would love to hear from you. Tony is on Facebook.